Psi investigator: On magic and being a maverick

By Peter Aldhous

Yes we can, according to a controversial new paper by leading social psychologist Daryl Bem. He tells Peter Aldhous how his hobby of stage magic led to a quest to bring parapsychology into the scientific mainstream

There are several alleged effects that we call “psi”, known popularly as extrasensory perception (ESP). Precognition – the perception of future events – is one of them. I took effects that all psychologists believe in and I reversed them in time. For example, if you present people with a set of words on a computer screen, then randomly select half of those words to give them practice …

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